Tobias Hill (1970–2023)

Following the relationships between families that live in tenements on Columbia Road in Bethnal Green, the story starts in 1948 amid the bomb sites left behind after the Second World War. The outlooks for the families are contrasted, with some content to earn enough to keep their families together, while others are more ambitious. Their backgrounds are also very varied, including refugees from Nazi Europe, recent immigrants from the Commonwealth and locals of many years standing. Hill’s writing captures their struggles to provide and to attain their aims, but at differing costs to the families. Then a life-changing event leads to a jump forward to 1968 and an exploration of how this event affected the families. Hill explores in a moving and sympathetic novel, the price that people may pay for pursuing their dreams while ignoring their family and friends.… (más)

Pointless piece of prose that classifies itself as a thriller. It is just a soporific piece of fiction that promises more than it delivers.
No thrilling aspect at all. Pieces of futuristic technology mix oddly with bits of retro, which doesn't help the credibility. The plot is infantile. The love story is so flimsy, it is laughable, and Anna is such a boring person. I think she is well-suited to her job as tax inspector.

The only saving grace of this book is its decent writing. Pity for failed storyline and weak plot.… (más)

Perhaps some of my comments I made as I was reading this book will best show what I thought of it as I was reading it -

"Wow, now here's an unlikeable protagonist." The main character is not a very likable kind of guy. He's just gone through a messy divorce and he's a bit gloomy. As we find out in the story, everyone else is fairly similar to Ben in the sense that they are, as a group, very unlikeable. No one really likes Ben and we find that no one has ever really liked Ben. Then again, these people that do not like Ben aren't really likable themselves.

I should probably mention the plot at this point - Oxford scholar goes off to Athens to find himself and escape his ex-wife and he ends up on an archaeological dig with a few people that really don't like him and who seem to have something to hide.

"This book is rather strange. And the main character is a bit. . .disturbing. Just reading it I feel drugged in some way, it has a heavy, distorted feel to it." There is a bit of a dreamy quality to this work. The author manages to keep things hidden and it was this aspect of the book that I liked.

"I think the only reason I keep reading this is to find out what's hidden." Then again, with so many unlikeable people that I finally thought to myself - I hope they kill each other off at the end, the only reason I made it to the end was because there really is a mystery here. Something is hidden. Is it literal? Figurative? Ever going to come to light?

The writing is very good, but there are no heroes here.

… (más)